What explains differences in attitudes towards wearing protective face masks to limit the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus? We investigated potential drivers of attitudes about mask wearing as part of a longitudinal study during the COVID-19 pandemic (N-participants = 711, N-countries = 36), focusing on people’s perceptions and feelings about seeing others in their local communities wearing masks. We found that both stress about COVID-19 and the local incidence rate of COVID-19 predicted these attitudes, but perceived risk of infection did not. We also found that older and politically right-leaning respondents tended to have more negative attitudes towards wearing masks, while those with more concern for future consequences have more positive attitudes. Individuals with a greater vulnerability to COVID-19 as well as those with increased disease-related stress reported inconsistent emotional reactions to seeing people wear masks in public. For example, older participants were likely to either strongly agree or strongly disagree that seeing others wear masks led to feelings of anxiety, and some individuals with high disease-related stress reported greater feelings of anxiety, whereas others reported increased feelings of safety, when seeing people wear masks in public. These findings highlight some of the demographic, psychological, and environmental factors that were associated with respondents’ attitudes toward face masks and will be of use to health policy efforts aiming to increase mask wearing and other protective behaviors.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing protective facial masks has become a divisive issue, yet little is known about what drives differences in mask wearing across individuals. We surveyed 711 people around the world, asking about mask wearing and several other variables. We found that people who reported greater perceived risk of infection, stress, and those with greater consideration of future consequences reported wearing masks more often during in-person interactions. Participants who knew more people who had been infected and those who lived in postal codes with higher prevalence of COVID-19 perceived their risk of infection to be higher and reported greater pandemic-related stress. Perceived risk of infection and pandemic-related stress were higher overall in women and those reporting greater future-orientedness. Finally, participants who were more politically conservative reported lower perceived risk of becoming infected and lower stress than those who were more liberal, but there was no reliable difference in mask wearing between these groups. This is the first of four papers investigating mask wearing using this data set; the forthcoming papers will focus on predicting attitudes and motivations about mask wearing, the situations in which people do and do not report wearing masks, and the extent to which people report mask wearing in their communities. This is part of a broader study to understand the psychological and social influences on mask wearing and, more broadly, the impacts of the pandemic on human behavior and social interactions.

Friendships are important for social support and mental health, yet social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic have limited people’s ability to interact with their friends during this difficult time. In August of 2020, we asked participants about changes in their friendships as a result of the pandemic - including changes in the quality of friendships and people’s feelings about their friends - as part of a larger longitudinal study. We found that people who are younger, male, and less educated reported more negative effects on their friendships as a result of the pandemic, including feeling lonelier and less satisfied with their friends, while people with higher subjective socioeconomic status (SES) wanted to make more and shallower friends than those with lower subjective SES. We also found that feelings of stress, isolation and guilt around friendship are associated with greater COVID-related social risk taking, such as being motivated to make new friends and visit friends in person. Males, who reported more negative effects of the pandemic on their friendship than females, also reported a greater likelihood than females that they would attend large parties. These results show that the pandemic is affecting friendships differently across demographic groups and suggest that the negative impacts of COVID-19 on friendships might motivate some COVID-related social risk taking in order to try to maintain friendships or build new ones.